These are the fingerless gloves I made to make good use of the one little 110 g. skein of yarn — beautiful, springy, lovely wool — I got for a dollar.

I made them pretty much during Bridget’s appointments with, in order, the chiropractor (who cleverly insisted on the X-ray her doctor neglected to order), the orthopedic surgeon (who cleverly thought that the oddity of her scoliosis might be due to something other than the usual unknown factors), the subsequent MRI (which took twice as long as predicted), neurosurgeon, and pre-ops.

According to Ravelry notes of others, this pattern is a mere bagatelle. Either two hundred people lied or I’m learning disabled when it comes to annoying eyelet lace glove instructions.

Anyway, I will expand on that further in my very own Ravelry notes, after I weave in the ends and block them. They’re done other than that. They are not perfect.

By any means.

Fortunately a lot of people, I find, are so blown away by the possibility that you would tackle such a thing as this lace that they refuse to see any issues with the many glaring flaws in the workmanship.

So that’s all good. Blind people with your daring! That’s what I say.

This is how much yarn was left! I think that’s amazing — such a small amount of yarn to make something so cute, with some to spare!

My other project for whiling away time in medical vicinities was to locate an article I had read in First Things and report on it to you, because it was awesome, and it conveniently does my work for me — you know, the work where I inarticulately try to convince you that whatever you teach your child must be connected to the past.

It’s always good to have university professors on hand to elucidate your unspoken thoughts. And articles like this one affirm my choice not to bother to research anything, because I know that someone else will do the work for me, sooner or later! I’ll just stay here and weed my asparagus bed while the historians and philosophers figure stuff out. My job is to point to what they say and nod my head.

I wanted to provide a link so that you could read it and then we could just “discuss” it. (It’s not really about school — much more high-brow than that — but trust me, you need to read it.)

What’s wonderful about this essay, from the point of view of one who is deciding on the dreaded Language Arts curriculum, is that Wilkin provides a clear overview of the goals of language. And that’s just what we homeschooling moms need! We need goals! We have to stop floundering around, right? We have to stop ditching our instincts for the latest flashy product, and we have to stop thinking that an old book won’t help us.

I guess you’ve heard that old adage about “pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants.” I’d say that Wilkin’s essay could be summed up thus, if I were giving you the short version. It’s the layering of culture that he’s talking about, but what excited me is having an intelligent overview in one handy spot. So often I’m reduced to the state of the man in Chesterton’s example, who upon being asked what it is about civilization he likes, can only stutter incoherently, waving his arms at the stereo and the books on the shelves.

Wilken explains that there are those who want to “liberate” reason from faith (a pet project of pygmies dating from the Enlightenment, that vexing period of intellectual history), yet don’t acknowledge their debt to the very faith they scorn. The debt is owed to the genius of early Christian scholars and artists who, themselves trained in Classical artistic forms, grammar, law, rhetoric, and philosophy, ensured the security of the patrimony of reason for the future. But even more, they explored how to transmute the inheritance into tools for expressing in words, especially, a new civilization in which reason and faith join to glorify God through culture.

Reading the section of the essay on Isidore, the early medieval Spanish author of the Etymologies — a vast cultural undertaking resembling something like a one-man encyclopedia of Classical learning — you can’t help but get excited about how much there is to know.

Then you can’t help but get a little of that suffocating feeling that comes over you (well, it does me!) when you start to wonder how to pass all this to your children.

Wilken likens Isadore’s “enterprise” of the Etymologies to E. D. Hirsch’s cultural literacy project. If you’ve ever hyperventilated over a book of that all too prolific gentleman, such as What Your Second Grader Needs to Know, you will appreciate that I’m not going to give you the grand tour of his work at the moment. What Hirsch did was to warn people that if you are going to read a newspaper or a textbook and understand what is being said, there are a lot of things you already have to know.

The problem is, how do you go about getting that knowledge? Or giving it to your children? Some people think you get out the list (which is what Hirsch’s books essentially are, lists) and then go down it, checking things off.

For adults preparing curricula, or for medieval monks compending ancient texts, that may be the way to go.

But for a child, it’s backwards.

Look at it this way. The newspaper or textbook was written by those who had received a certain education (not necessarily formally, mind). Their cultural literacy was high enough to produce a text that, in turn, requires a reader who is also familiar with the background material.

Therefore, it makes more sense to ensure that readers have an equivalent (or, at this point, another watered-down generation later, greater) education of the same sort.

And that is what my precious readers, the Bobbs-Merrill ones, start the child along the road to: the broad familiarity with the history, poetry, literature, mythology, and art of the past, such that they can remain conversant with the present and provide the texts of the future. Anything less (and it’s only a beginning) effectively cuts them off from that textured, layered, faceted body of knowledge.

What today’s pygmies want to give our children is a two-dimensional type of knowledge. They don’t want to confront the reality of the slow process that went into building our culture and the great responsibility that lies on us to transmit it.

On the other hand you have Hirsch (and many others, including Susan Wise Bauer and other “classical”- or “core”- type educators) who, certainly appreciating the vast storehouse of learning that is our patrimony, want to make sure that every child is force-fed every bit of it. Which isn’t really possible.

There is the whole home environment, which is what this stinkin’ blog is about anyway, there are your actual books, all of which should be wonderful classics, and there is reading out loud. Oh, there is so much!

The readers are only providing the signposts along the way — but they did it, didn’t they! Along with a stable home environment, good books, and solid liturgy, these readers educated the generation that produced the books that our generation can’t read because it lacks the resources. Rather than pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, let’s just go back.

Wilken’s doesn’t say this part. That’s all me. His argument at this point in the essay, after mentioning his colleague Hirsch and sending me off on this tangent, is that language is necessary for reason, yet revelation can’t flourish without language either. In fact, the Christian revelation is The Word, the Son of God made flesh. And not only did Christians embrace all that reason had bestowed on civilization before the time of Christ, they studied, structured, and preserved it for our time, including for those who no longer see the worth in such a project or who don’t even know how to ask where they got their high vantage point. You know, the one the pygmies stand on.

Wilken ends with a marvelous meditation on two of Raphael’s paintings — one, his School of Athens (a copy of which hangs in a main building at the University of Virginia and many other places of learning); the other, the Disputa (Adoration of the Sacrament).

I wish you could read what he says for yourself. His point is that the horizontal exaltation of reason in the former painting, is completed by the horizontal and vertical composition of the latter, reason with faith, intersecting at the Sacrament of the Body and Blood, of the Word made flesh.

The two paintings, he discovers, are hung by the artist in one room in a building in Rome. Ancient reason is completed by the light of faith.

“Raphael’s Disputa lifts our minds toward things that cannot be seen while putting before us those who, in the words of the Book of Wisdom, obtained “friendship with God” and were “commended for the gifts that come from instruction.”

Comments

I have so enjoyed these posts on reading. I have both American Cardinal Readers and Catholic National Readers that I am using with my kids that seem similar to your Bobbs-Merrill ones. They are getting more interesting as they kids get older, I love the content; all the history, stories, poems and fables all put together in a nice little book that is the perfect size for kids. Intelligent reading at appropriate levels is not the easiest thing to find!

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